The recent brouhaha over pink slime (and other lovely mass meat production processes) is only the beginning. Here’s our roundup of some standout reporting about the food on your plate.

This is a multifaceted, perennial topic. If you think Propublica missed any, we’re happy to hear suggestions. Please email a link to MuckReads@propublica.org or tweet it with the hashtag #muckreads.

Safety of Beef Processing Method Is Questioned, The New York Times, December 2009
A look at the development of Beef Product Inc.’s “novel” method of meat production that later became known as the infamous “pink slime.” Reporter Michael Moss won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigations into contaminated beef.

Our Dwindling Food Variety, National Geographic, July 2011
Our dwindling food variety, in a stride-stopping infographic.
Contributed by @kleinmatic

What the USDA Doesn’t Want You to Know About Antibiotics and Factory Farms, Mother Jones, July 2011
The U.S. Department of Agriculture appears to have repeatedly removed a report by a USDA-contracted researcher that summarized recent academic work, from “reputed, scientific, peer-reviewed, and scholarly journals,” on possible links between antibiotic-resistant infections and factory farm animals. Mother Jones got a permanent PDF of the researcher’s report, dubbing it the “document the USDA doesn’t want you to see.”
Contributed by @foodinteg

Asian Honey, Banned in Europe, Is Flooding U.S. Grocery Shelves, Food Safety News, August 2011

Some of the biggest U.S. honey packers knowingly bought honey of questionable quality so they could sell it on the cheap. Much of it was likely smuggled from China (honey the European Union has banned) and may have been laced with lead and illegal animal antibiotics — if it was really honey at all.

America’s Dangerous Food-Safety System, The Daily Beast/ Newsweek, September 2011
A shortage of inspectors in the U.S. food-safety system exposes Americans to the risk of illness and death.
Contributed by @StepShep

Nation’s Food Anti-terror Plans Costly, Unwieldy, Associated Press, September 2011 
An AP investigation into the United States’ $3.4 billion food counter-terrorism program found that progress had been slowed by a complex web of bureaucracy.
Contributed by @joannalin

On The Menu, But Not On Your Plate, Boston Globe, October 2011
A Globe-organized DNA test revealed scores of mislabeled fish in Massachusetts restaurants, grocery stores and seafood markets. Often, “local” fish was actually hauled from thousands of miles away, and while some chefs and store owners seemed to have no clue, others admitted to knowingly selling mislabeled food to boost profits. Experts said it reflects a nationwide trend that causes diners to unwittingly overpay, may make people sick and results in overfishing.

Contributed by @JoeYerardi

Dispute Over Drug in Feed Limiting U.S. Meat Exports, MSNBC, January 2012
The controversial drug ractopamine has sickened or killed more pigs than any other livestock drug on the market, leading the EU and China, which together produce and consume about 70 percent of the world’s pork, to refuse meat imports raised on the additive. The U.S. pork industry wants to change their minds.
Contributed by @NaomiStarkman

How Washington Went Soft on Child Obesity, Reuters, April 2012
The food and beverage industries have more than doubled their spending on lobbying in Washington in the last three years. And now Congress has declared pizza a vegetable.
Contributed by @mariancw

A History of FDA Inaction on Animal Antibiotics, ProPublica, April 2012
Everything you ever wanted to know about the Food and Drug Administration’s actions, or lack thereof, to keep antibiotics out of your food.

As Beef Cattle Become Behemoths, Who Are Animal Scientists Serving? The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 2012
A growing number of animal scientists employed by public universities are accepting payouts from pharmaceutical companies. They’re often hired to persuade farmers to use antibiotics that fatten up cattle but haven’t necessarily been proven safe. Some have been banned in the E.U. and China.
Contributed by @MelodyPetersen

Bonus points: In 1968, Nathan Kotz of the Des Moines Register and Minneapolis Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on unsanitary conditions in meat packing plants, which, according to the Pulitzer site, helped ensure passage of the Federal Wholesome Meat Act of 1967. Anybody have an online copy?

by Blair Hickman, ProPublica, May 7, 2012, 12:21 p.m.

The article The Best, Most Disgusting Reporting on Food Safety appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

More than 70 years after the first sulfa drugs helped to revolutionize medical care and save millions of lives, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists have determined at an atomic level the mechanism these medications use to kill bacteria. The discovery provides the basis for a new generation of antibiotics that would likely be harder for bacteria to resist and cause fewer side effects.

The work focused on sulfa drugs and their target enzyme, dihydropteroate synthase (DHPS). Most disease-causing microorganisms need DHPS to help make the molecule folate, which is required for the production of DNA and some amino acids.

Working with enzymes from gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria, researchers used a variety of techniques to determine for the first time the key intermediate structure DHPS forms during the chemical reaction to advance folate production. The structure also explains at a molecular level how sulfa drugs function and how resistance causing mutations help bacteria withstand them.

The findings mark a major advance in both microbial biochemistry and anti-microbial drug discovery. The study is published in the March 2 issue of the journal Science.

“The structure we found was totally unexpected and really opens the door for us and others to design a new class of inhibitors targeting DHPS that will help us avoid side effects and other problems associated with sulfa drugs,” said Stephen White, Ph.D., chair of the St. Jude Department of Structural Biology and the paper’s corresponding author.

Co-author Richard Lee, Ph.D., a member of the St. Jude Department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics, added: “Now we want to leverage this information to develop drugs against the opportunistic infections that threaten so many St. Jude patients.”

Sulfa drugs were discovered in the 1930s and became the first antibiotic in widespread use. Although the drugs were early victims of antibiotic resistance, they are still widely used against emerging infectious diseases and to prevent infections in patients with weakened immune systems, including St. Jude patients undergoing cancer chemotherapy. The growing problem of antibiotic resistance has prompted renewed interest in sulfa drugs as a possible source of new therapeutic targets, Lee said.

Previous work had shown that sulfa drugs target DHPS and work by mimicking a molecule called pABA. DHPS advances folate production by accelerating the fusion of pABA and another molecule called dihydropteridine pyrophosphate (DHPP). Until now, however, scientists did not know exactly how the DHPS reaction occurred or how sulfa drugs disrupted the process.

Working on enzymes from gram-positive Bacillus anthracis and gram-negative Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that cause anthrax and plague, researchers first used computational methods to predict the enzyme’s activity. Next they used a technique called X-ray crystallography to capture the unfolding chemical reaction and confirm the prediction. X-ray crystallography involves bombarding proteins trapped in crystals with X-rays to determine the protein structure.

Researchers showed that DHPP binds to a specific pocket in DHPS. Aided by magnesium, the binding promotes the break-up of DHPP and release of pyrophosphate. Two long flexible loops then create an intermediate structure that sets the stage for pABA to enter and bind in a second short-lived pocket, allowing pABA to fuse with the cleaved DHPP. Investigators captured all four actors in the drama in a single crystal structure, including the intermediate cleaved DHPP molecule whose existence was previously unknown.

The results showed that the mechanism involves a chemical reaction known as an Sn1 reaction rather than the anticipated Sn2 reaction. “This is a key finding for drug discovery because it reveals chemical features of the DHPS enzyme’s active site that we can exploit in developing new drugs,” said study co-author Donald Bashford, Ph.D., an associate member of the St. Jude Department of Structural Biology.

The study also provided insights into sulfa drug resistance. Investigators showed that the binding sites of pABA and the sulfa drugs overlap, but that sulfa drugs extend beyond the pocket in which pABA binds.

Mutations associated with drug resistance cluster around this extended region of the pABA pocket, which explains how mutations can prevent the drugs from binding without seriously affecting the binding of pABA. The work also highlights the transitory structure made by the two DHPS loops as a target for a new class of drugs that would be difficult for bacteria to develop resistance against.

“When we set out on this project eight years ago, a goal was to truly understand the catalytic mechanism of the DHPS protein and how the inhibitors targeting it work. I am ecstatic we’ve succeeded,” Lee said. The success grew out of an interdisciplinary effort and some luck, White said. The plague enzyme turned out to be well suited to this project.

Unlike the DHPS enzymes from other bacteria, the two extended loops are free to form the short-lived structure and the pABA pocket when the enzyme is immobilized in the crystal.

The study’s first authors are Mi-Kyung Yun of St. Jude and Yinan Wu, a University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center graduate student working in White’s laboratory. The other authors are Zhenmei Li, Ying Zhao, M. Brett Waddell and Antonio Ferreira, all of St. Jude. The research was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health and ALSAC.

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The Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming recently praised the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for limiting the use of cephalosporins in food animal production.

Cephalosporins are vital treatments for children suffering from infection; unlike other antibiotics, such as fluoroquinolones and tetracyclines, they carry no warnings or precautions for pediatric use.  They also are important medicines for treating people suffering from bacterial meningitis and infections of the bone, urinary tract, and upper respiratory system, as well as those associated with cancer.

“We applaud FDA’s move,” said Laura Rogers, project director of the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming. “This restriction is a victory for human health, as it will help ensure we can still rely on cephalosporins to treat life-threatening infections today and in the future.”

Although FDA has approved cephalosporins to treat some infections in food animals, the drugs often are administered in ways not specifically approved by the agency.  Its rule will apply to such extralabel use of cephalosporins in meat and poultry production, which multiple studies have linked to the emergence of cephalosporin-resistant bacteria that can infect people.

If cephalosporins continue to be overused on industrial farms, these drugs will lose their effectiveness.  As a result, many human infections will become more difficult to treat, leading to more deaths and higher health care costs.

“This action is a good first step,” added Ms. Rogers, ”and we encourage FDA to issue guidelines expeditiously that restrict the overuse and misuse of other critical antibiotics on industrial farms.”

In 2010, officials from FDA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention testified before Congress that there was a definitive link between the uses of antibiotics in food animal production and the crisis of antibiotic resistance in humans.  In addition, many medical organizations including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Health Organization warn that this practice is putting human health at risk.

To ensure additional human antibiotics work when we need them, the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming also urges Congress to pass the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (H.R. 965, S. 1211). A 60-day public comment will follow FDA’s announcement, during which Pew will submit a formal response to the agency.

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The American Veterinary Medical Association has announced that the FDA’s order prohibiting certain uses of cephalosporins in food animals appears consistent with the current AVMA position on the limited prohibition on extra-label drug use, but warned against further restrictions not backed by science.

Cephalosporins, a class of antimicrobial drug used in livestock, poultry, and other food-producing animals, are also commonly used in humans to treat pneumonia and a wide range of skin and soft tissue infections, urinary tract infections, and inflammatory disease. The FDA said it is limiting the use of cephalosporins in animals to preserve the effectiveness of the drugs for treating disease in humans and reduce the risk of cephalosporin resistance in certain bacterial pathogens.

“The AVMA is pleased that the FDA reviewed and thoughtfully considered the many comments received from stakeholders, including veterinarians, while taking action to preserve the effectiveness of cephalosporin drugs for treating disease in humans,” said Dr. Rene Carlson, AVMA president. ”

Veterinarians are committed to improving the health and welfare of people, animals, and the environment, and we hope the FDA’s order will allow veterinarians to have therapeutic options for food animals while also protecting public health.”

The AVMA is evaluating the prohibition of cephalosporins for preventive uses and will submit a response to the FDA during the comment period. The AVMA has a strong position which underscores the importance of veterinary access to antimicrobials for preventive use to enhance food safety, public health, and animal welfare.

“We are committed to the judicious use of antimicrobials in food animals,” said Dr. Carlson. “While this measure appears to be consistent with our position, we will continue to review any further restrictions to make sure they are backed by science and don’t place arbitrary and ultimately harmful limits on veterinarians’ ability to treat animals and ensure a safe and healthy food supply.”

The AVMA, founded in 1863, is one of the oldest and largest veterinary medical organizations in the world, with more than 81,500 member veterinarians worldwide engaged in a wide variety of professional activities.

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